


Might Be Part Of Something Larger

by tb_ll57



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Backstory, Episode Tag, F/M, Gap Filler, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 20:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1278634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He’d hit that place he sometimes found where all feeling dropped away and he could be so callous and cold that he knew he was his father’s son after all. And he regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth, and regretted the way she was staring at him. Maybe they were all a little bit like House, these days, after holding on to the job for so long. Maybe they all had it in them to be a little cruel, and the experience at PPTH made it easier to haul it to the surface. Maybe they’d just never been the people they were trying to be.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Might Be Part Of Something Larger

**Author's Note:**

> Contains self-explanatory references to Jesse Spencer's role in 'Death In Holy Orders'.

She was a patient when he met her, but not his patient, and only for an ear infection. She was standing in front of PPTH when he got off work at four, raging stridently into her mobile phone and flipping the bird at anyone who frowned at her impropriety. Later Chase would always think of their meeting as his own private porn role. Inspired somehow with more courage than he’d normally have, he’d walked right up to her, and all the swearing she was doing died out when he got close, as she looked him head to toe and back up again. He’d said, ‘Need a ride someplace?’ and she’d answered, ‘Fuckyeah,’ all one word like that, and he’d driven her home with her hand in his lap the whole twenty-four miles.

Maybe it was because they knew nothing about each other, not even names, but the sex was unbelievable. Her walls were all painted violent colours, blood reds and screaming purples, and there were three pairs of handcuffs hanging from her bed board and a ten-inch glow-in-the-dark vibrator practically framed on her bedside table, but no family photographs, no posters of Van Gogh or Georgia O’Keefe, no pet toys or stuffed animals or anything else to indicate who the hell she was. She kicked him out at four in the morning, then ran out topless into the parking lot to demand his phone number. He would have been crazy not to give it to her, but he hadn’t really expected to ever hear from her again. He was already writing the anecdote he’d make of her in his head, right down to the gesture he’d make to describe the scratches she’d plowed into his back.

But she’d called at eight-oh-five, before he’d even settled in Diagnostics with his first cup of tea, and told him he was going to meet her for breakfast.

The concession she’d made to reality– something severely lacking from his perception of the whole affair– was already being in the PPTH cafeteria when she summoned him. ‘Saw your ID,’ she said carelessly, before he’d even worked up the nerve to ask if she’d followed him. ‘Buy me something sweet.’

It never really became a relationship, but it was definitely something on the Richter Scale. She was an absolute mystery from start to finish. He never knew her name, for one, or really anything else about her but that she liked a Long Island heavy on the tequila, that she brushed her teeth after every blow job, that she owned just one skirt that covered her ass and that she must have worked in a bank, because she gave him solid advice on choosing a better account. What she knew about him might have fit into the same thimble. She called him Chase, just once, for no determinable reason, but never again, and though she’d show up at PPTH once a while, she never asked what he did. It made it easier to shake off the questions he did get, from House who wanted to know why there was glitter lipgloss smeared on his collar, from a nurse who noticed a bite mark on the side of his hand, from Carlson, House’s other fellow, who wanted to know if having a girlfriend kept him from quitting whenever House rode them too hard.

He quit when she told him to burn her.

At that point it was probably a feeble protest, as he’d already followed her to clubs too shady to even be in town, let her strangle him to the moment of climax, and suffered through a bad comparison with Catholic school when she brought out a paddle one night. But the burning seemed to go a little too far, touched just close enough to the vow he’d taken to do no harm, and though he thought about it– a lot– he couldn’t ever really figure that fire met sex in a productive way. He was too familiar with the truly self-destructive not to know it when he encountered it, and so he met her demand with a firm offer to help her find a healthy alternative. She was furious with him, dumping him on the spot, then leaving twelve separate messages on his voicemail that ran as long as the recording would allow calling him every name he’d ever heard of and plenty that he hadn’t. He even let House listen to one of the messages, when House caught him receiving it during lunch hour, and House bought him a candy bar ‘for your absolute lack of better judgement.’

But he must have had some, because he was rather relieved once she was out of his life again.

 

**

 

Peter was his first, though nothing ever happened between them. Emotionally, spiritually, Peter was the first, and that was something for which he’d always be grateful.

After his mother died, his father sent him to live with his mother’s relatives in England. John Arbuthnot was a Dean of Academics at St Anselm’s Seminary College, so whether it was fate or a guiding hand or just an interesting coincidence, Robert was given to God before he made the choice to give himself. But St Anselm’s was a frigid, lonely place. It perched like a medieval ruin atop crumbling crags by the pounding ocean. It was a brown blur in his mind from the moment he arrived to the moment he left. There was never any warmth there, even in England’s feeble summers, there was never enough light. His mother’s cousins were like that, too, remote from him and too old for a fifteen-year-old to connect to anyway. John and Agatha were more like his father in that way, Agatha domineering, demanding of his time when he didn’t want to give it and oblivious to his own needs, when he dared to show them. John was kinder, but afraid of him, and in the English way of things, it was months before an older student imparted the old gossip about John’s paedophilia charge. It wasn’t the first time he’d been embarrassed of his looks, but, at fifteen, being told he was too pretty not to test an old pervert’s predilections was tantamount to being set on a stage for everyone to peer at. He never got over that, the suspicion that everyone at St Anselm’s was waiting for something to happen, waiting for him to fall prey to the monstrous.

The only place that touched something in him at St Anselm’s was the chapel. The floors were pitted old stone, the names of the dead buried beneath almost stamped from existence by the shuffle of a thousand years of feet. The pews and the choir were of creaking black oak that seemed too fragile to survive another week, yet went on, unchanged, century after century. The graceful arches of the ceiling always pulled his eyes heavenward. Even the sorrowful Van der Weyden with its pale, dead Christ being carried from the Crucifixion seemed gentle, its tragedy too humane and its silence too deep. It was in that chapel that he experienced, for the first and only time in his life, something he hardly knew how to identify; peace. The chapel eased the tightness he’d carried in his chest, in his gut, in every muscle for a decade. It eased the anger he’d thought was just a part of him. It eased the self-loathing that pressed suffocatingly close whenever John looked at him too long, whenever a teacher stopped to express one more useless condolence for his mother’s passing, whenever the college’s counselor asked why he hadn’t made any friends, as if he could magic them into existence. The chapel was the answer to all of that, and Robert took it with both hands.

John spoke for him to the other deans, and they accepted his application to the seminary just before his sixteenth birthday. A long letter and an argumentative phone call from his father, now somewhere in South America working-half-to-death-and-no-time-for-games-Robbie, you’ll-regret-this-sooner-than-you-think didn’t deter him, and he committed himself to the Church of England.

Peter Buckhurst was afraid of storms.

At first he’d loved his chosen vocation. Loved the thick scratchy wool of his ordinand’s robe, the safety and the invulnerability it wrapped him in. He loved practicing the sibilant sounds of the Hebrew and hearing the English echoes of the ancient Greek. Learning the Decretals and the canons filled him with a sense of vast history and order and justice. He applied for, and received, permission to take extra courses, to accelerate beyond the other teenagers who preferred to loiter after class rather than work hard, more concerned with their social set than with practical apologetics and public evangelical theology. But the hell of it was that his father was right. It took him almost a year to realise that what he loved on paper, in the solitude of midnight studies, he could not translate to a ministry of the flesh.

Peter Buckhurst was afraid of storms, but he wasn’t afraid of Robert.

Peter was solitary himself, a tall boy with dark hair and darker eyes who cringed when people yelled and followed when he was told to and cried out in his sleep. He was a natural target for bullies, and Robert was a natural defender of the weak. A black eye for Philip Penman meant a constant companion for Robert, and a new responsibility to replace the one he’d left behind in Canberra.

It was nothing to agree to sit with Peter during the odd torrential rain and booming thunder that struck St Anselm’s during winter. It was easy enough to wile the night away reading aloud from Psalms, and then the Gospels during the spring, and by summer storms The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Imitation of Christ. Peter’s eyes would track him as he shifted on the hard chair, follow his hands as he turned pages, smile with quiet devotion when he struggled not to yawn. It wasn’t nothing when Peter asked, small-voiced and trembling, if Robert would get in the bed with him, but the windows were rattling, lightning kept the room almost as bright as daylight, and Peter’s mother had died in a storm this bad. It wasn’t nothing to give in to that request, but he did, because he knew too much about raw wounds that wouldn’t close. He was too afraid to shed his formal robe, too afraid of what would be said if anyone found them in such a compromised embrace, but Peter clung to him, his dark eyes squeezed painfully shut, and Robert sang all the lullabies and hymns he could remember with his lips against Peter’s soft hair. The storm at last abated during the final hour of dark before dawn, but Peter, even then, didn’t let him go... They lay wrapped together, Peter’s head on his chest, tucked beneath his chin, and Peter’s bare foot crept up his ankle, until Robert was the one who was trembling.

‘I can’t,’ he whispered once. But Peter never asked him for what he couldn’t give.

Too afraid of failing.

 

**

 

The first and only romantic sex he ever had was with James Wilson, which both figured, and didn’t.

‘Wait,’ Wilson had called, suddenly desperate. Chase had turned, the door handle slipping from his fingers, just as Wilson’s collided with his arm and grabbed him hard. In retrospect, the mind wanted to supply phrases like ‘before he could protest,’ but in the moment of it happening, there was plenty of time to shake him off, to pull away, to yell if he really wanted to. He didn’t, and his feet moved voluntarily as Wilson drew him toward the on-call crib. The beds were all empty and freshly made, the alarm clock read ‘6:23' in large green numerals, and Wilson shut and locked the door behind them and turned off the light.

‘What,’ Chase said, not even asking, but Wilson took it as a question, and embraced him.

When people know what kind of doctor they’re going to be, a lecturer had told him once, it’s usually when they’ve just done the one thing they’re going to do most in the specialism they choose. Chase had known he would be an intensivist the first time he’d been calm and clear after sitting through the night with a borderline patient who didn’t die on his watch. It was possible that Wilson had known he’d be an oncologist when he’d fought a cancerous tumour and won, but then and always after, Chase figured Wilson had known the first time he’d held a dying person and helped them own their grief.

Wilson embraced him, and Chase struggled, instinctively. But Wilson kept him trapped there, arms holding his tight to his sides, his chest warm and implacable against Chase’s cheek. They stood there in the dark like that, until Chase froze or surrendered or accepted it or something muddled like that and– Wilson said, ‘It’s all right to fall apart sometimes.’

Maybe he’d meant it’s all right to be angry at House, because House has crossed all the invisible lines this time and everyone knows. Maybe he’d meant this has been a long time coming, and I know you’ve been alone with it. Maybe he’d meant nothing, and it was what he said to all those patients who didn’t have a reason any more to stay strong. But they stood there, Wilson holding him like that, in the dark, and what it meant to Chase was that there was no-one there to see if was weak, just this once, if he let himself be touched by someone who cared for whatever stupid reason for the first time... in... in so long he wasn’t sure he knew any more.

It was a gift, and Chase took it.

Wilson held him the way he might have held a woman, like he was something small and delicate, something deserving of gentleness. Wilson laid him on his back on a cot, and kissed him sweetly on the mouth, on his eyelids, on the bruise House had left. They undressed each other, and with every layer removed, Chase felt a little stronger, a little wholer. Their ties went slithering to the carpet, their shoes thunked softly when they landed, and Chase stopped being angry at House for being human and fallible. When he drew the starched fabric of Wilson’s shirt down smooth arms and warm skin, he gave up his childish hurt that no-one had acknowledged that he had solved a case. Wilson unbuckled his belt and pulled it free of each beltloop, and Chase remembered that Alice was going to walk home with all her limbs, and that he had made that possible. When he was naked and Wilson mumbled something about a lubricated condom and then was in him and all he could do was breathe, he forgave his mother and father for dying, and let himself miss them for maybe the first time in his life.

The feeling didn’t quite outlive getting dressed again after, but Wilson pressed open lips against his temple, and he closed his eyes and found he could remember enough of it if he tried.

 

**

 

Allison Cameron was nothing terribly remarkable. There’d been another female fellow, when Chase was first hired, though she hadn’t been there by the time he started. She’d been gorgeous, too– House had his consistencies– a black girl who looked like Vanessa Williams, a supermodel even in shapeless shirts and her corn-rows done in a careless tail at the nape of her neck. Next to her, Cameron would have looked like she was trying too hard, her make-up too perfect, her hair too styled, her business suits too fashionable. When House asked his opinion of the interview without ever letting him see Cameron’s CV, Chase had answered that she was hired, but only because he’d guessed that House had seen something under that too-perfect surface that warranted a possible three year term of daily inspection.

She was a competent doctor. She made an effort to be pleasant. She thought it mattered whether or not their patients were good people, which Chase did not agree with, but House was more than capable of pounding that out of her. And she was completely asexual, until Brandon-with-the-cough became Diagnostic’s problem, and Cameron said the word sex.

She stood less than a foot away from him, so close he could smell the faint lavender scent from her hair, her eyes wide and unblinking, and he could see the thrum of the vein in her throat.

‘Sex can kill you,’ she said, each word just a tiny bit breathless, sighing instead of just exhaling. ‘Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries contract, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets... respiration becomes rapid and shallow... the brain fires bursts of electrical impulse from no-where to no-where, and secretions spit out of every gland.’

He was so close to the end of that, suddenly, that he couldn’t even think. He just stood staring at her, unable to break eye contact, even when she took one more step toward him, nearly touching him.

‘It’s violent,’ she said, ‘and it’s ugly, and it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out aeons ago.’ She paused, and he found the willpower to swallow dryly. ‘Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm,’ she murmured. ‘Do you know women can have an hour-long orgasm?’

He was never sure if he wanted to kill Foreman or thank him, for interrupting right then.

The hell of it was that she knew she was winding him up, and didn’t care about leaving him like that. She turned him down flat when he tried to ask her to a drink later. He didn’t know, really, what she thought of him, but evidently it wasn’t enough to care about manipulating him. He was used to it from House, who never failed to toss out some comment about his hair, his face, his ass, making him too self-aware, making him apologise for himself. Cameron turned him down flat, and expected him to take it, and knew that he would.

A year and a half later, she pulled him in to her mouth like she’d drown otherwise, and peeled his clothes off like he’d dressed just to offend her, and pushed him down on her lacy white doona like he might try to run if she gave him the chance. And he might have wanted to, but he wouldn’t have done it, because he’d been wanting this to happen since she first made him think about her as a woman.

She showed up at work the next day– he wouldn’t have, and that’s an instinct for self-preservation that Cameron simply hadn’t got. She showed up looking absolutely cactus, completely wrecked, but it apparently never occurred to her not to come to work with a drug hangover. She was still buzzing, and the moment he got a chance to get her away from House’s accusations and Foreman’s smug grins, he pulled her into the bathroom and gave her a prescription of adovan. She glared at him the entire time like it was his fault.

He heard himself start to speak, but where it was coming from, he had no idea. ‘You’re such a bitch,’ he told her, and that was the first time in his entire life that he’d used that word. On some level he was so shocked with himself that everything shifted sideways into a comedy, and he started to laugh.

Cameron looked like he’d hit her; then she looked like she might, maybe, actually, be a little sorry. ‘I’m not entirely sure I earned that,’ she muttered back, and drank her entire water bottle.

‘No?’ He shrugged expansively, an insane little giggle still squirming around in his gut. ‘You could have had practically any man in for your little booty-call. House, or Foreman, or even Wilson. Even a stranger off the street. But you called me. So, no worries. I guess I know what I was missing all this time. Crush over. You can call the stranger next time.’

He’d hit that place he sometimes found where all feeling dropped away and he could be so callous and cold that he knew he was his father’s son after all. And he regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth, and regretted the way she was staring at him. Maybe they were all a little bit like House, these days, after holding on to the job for so long. Maybe they all had it in them to be a little cruel, and the experience at PPTH made it easier to haul it to the surface. Maybe they’d just never been the people they were trying to be.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She screwed the top back onto the bottle, because Cameron did everything the way it was supposed to be done. She didn’t say it was okay, but her shoulders evened out. ‘How can you be so calm?’ she asked instead.

‘Not coming off meth helps.’ He looked away from her, but the wall seemed bland. No frazzled hair, no smudged racoon eyes glowering back at him, no lips too pale and chewed raw. And he knew, then, that the crush wasn’t over, that he might feel something real for her now, that seeing her flawed and hurt and daring, at least, daring to fall down badly flat on her face if it meant feeling alive when she was scared of dying, made him admire her all the more.

‘We shouldn’t do this again,’ he said, and wished he hadn’t said that, either.

 

**

 

The next was Paul. Robert was beginning to accept that he might be gay, or at least turning gay, if people turned into whatever sexuality they were supposed to be. He didn’t know. But there was so much he didn’t know, he was beginning to get used to being in limbo about everything.

He met Paul, or Paul met him, his first year of medical school. It wasn’t the best school, because the best schools weren’t all that eager to accept a student who had a Masters in Contemporary Ministry and no science background. But he’d always had a talent for science and he’d tested out of biology of cancer, human genetics, anatomy and basic immunology to walk in as a second year. He could thank his father for that inheritance; that, and the money to convince St George’s to accelerate past classroom experience he probably needed. Paul didn’t know any of that when they were assigned to work together on the research lab for clinical neuroscience. All Paul knew, he said, was that Robert was fuckable six ways to Sunday.

Paul took him on his first pub crawl and got him completely off his face on cheap liquor drinks. They staggered down the streets of London arm in arm, when they could manage the balance, and ricocheting off glass storefronts when they couldn’t. He never remembered going back to Paul’s flat, but every excruciating moment of waking up face-down on the bathroom floor was etched by diamond into his eyelids. When he rolled over, Paul was there, shirtless and stretched all over the doorframe like a cat and grinning down at him.

‘Shower together?’ Paul said.

They kissed under the water, and Robert was terrified of admitting he’d never done this before. So he kept his mouth shut– figuratively– when Paul touched him, trying to learn from what Paul did and repeating it back, the same thing as he did in his clinical courses. It helped get through the awkwardness to parse it out in dry scientific terms. He manipulated the prepuce back to reveal the glans, dipped a fingernail into the meatus and down around the slick frenelum. There were more than twenty ridged bands that rubbed the corona, and each had Meissner’s corpuscles that responded to the pressure of his grip. Specialized ecoptic sebaceous glans on the inner preputial surface produced natural emollients and lubricants necessary for normal sexual function. Was this normal sexual function? The scrape of Paul’s stubble on his lips made him dizzy. Paul turned him roughly to face the tiled wall and made him spread his legs. He kept his mouth shut, biting his lower lip until it stung, as fingers pounded his prostate and cradled his testes. He orgasmed with a weak gasp, ejaculated into Paul’s palm, and felt an answering warmth spattering the small of his back.

He left three hours later, unpleasantly sore inside, still queasy and hungover, but full of completely incautious hope. He thought about Paul all weekend, lay in bed hoping for a call, a drop-in, an invitation, and telling himself slower might be better as Saturday turned into Sunday and Sunday rolled labouriously into Monday. He wore a good shirt to the lab on Tuesday, a white button-down over a new red tee, worried too much about shaving or not and ended out rubbing his smooth cheek in regret while he rode the tube. His heart beat too fast as he walked from the stop to the labs, palpitating so apprehensively that when he opened the door and finally did see Paul, he couldn’t do more than nod a greeting and slide onto his stool behind the computer console. And Paul all but ignored him, even turning his shoulder when Robert coughed.

‘Want to go out for drinks again tonight?’ he asked.

Paul sighed loudly. ‘Look, Chase, don’t take this hard, but I’ve got a boyfriend, all right?’

He was stunned. Thoughts started, but went mis-firing to no-where, and he sat staring blankly at a CAT scan.

‘What was that with me then?’ he managed eventually.

‘Don’t be such a fucking nelly.’ Paul gathered his notes in a rush and glared at him with bored eyes. ‘Twinks are fun for a bit of fluff, but you didn’t really think I’d date you or something, did you?’

Robert never answered. He stared at the CAT scan, willing it to materialise into sense, willing himself to melt through the floor, to freeze up so he didn’t have to feel so overwhelmingly a fool. Paul left, then, and Robert stayed there, alone, nauseous with every excruciating inch of it.

 

**

 

Kayla was dead, and it was his fault.

The chapel rejected him, at least in his own guilty imagination, and Cameron and Foreman were still in the office, unaffected by the imploding entropy of his life. He retreated to the lab, took what comfort could be offered by a centrifuge and the new Prior StereoMaster microscope. Whenever he looked up, hours had passed, whole hours with nothing to prove they’d existed. The interview with Stacy had formed a knot in his stomach, heavy and twisting and ominous. He couldn’t let it go, couldn’t find the objectivity to step back from it. The review board had cleared him, but it was the interview with Stacy that left him fighting, losing, to this strangling yoke of dread–

‘Chase,’ House said, before Chase even knew he was there.

‘They’re suspending me for a week,’ Chase answered. ‘There’s still the malpractice suit to get through.’

House eased onto a stool, resting his cane between his knees. His hands crossed over the handle, unusually still. ‘I killed a patient once when I was your age,’ he said, in that abrupt way he had, but softly. ‘Your premiums will go up, and you’ll live out of your car for a while, but your life doesn’t actually end.’

Chase was finishing his charts, unwilling to leave them incomplete before starting his suspension. But his pen hadn’t moved in an hour, and he had to flip to the front to remember which case he was on. ‘It feels like it ought to,’ he said. He carefully penned the prescription he’d given, adding that the patient had switched medications twice previously. ‘It just... feels like it should.’

‘Is all this guilt a Catholic thing, or are you just used to taking the blame for dead women?’

Chase held his breath, the only way he knew to stop his eyes from stinging. He didn’t respond, and hoped House wouldn’t push it.

House didn’t. He waited for a little while, and then he stood. He shuffled a few steps toward the door, and Chase heard it open.

A warm hand came to rest on his shoulder. ‘It was your fault,’ House murmured. ‘But that’s just proof that we have to try hard, and do better. We’re responsible for them, even when they’re irresponsible with themselves. If you learn from it, it will make you a better doctor.’

House’s thumb brushed through the hair at the base of his neck, back and forth twice, one too many times to be an accident. Chase closed his eyes, willing himself not to turn into the caress. If it was that. If he didn’t need it so much, it might not have been anything but human contact.

House left, and Chase swallowed down the ache of longing.


End file.
